The Visit to the Tema Oil Refinery (TOR) by President John Evans Atta Mills was nearly marred by employees’ demand for the dismissal of Dr. Joe Oteng Adjei, Energy Minister and Dr. Kwame Ampofo, Managing Director of the refinery, both of whom the workers have described as inefficient.
The workers’ demand was prompted by the President’s deliberate avoidance of a question about when the delivery of crude oil was going to be. He was greeted by a simultaneous chorus of “Oteng Adjei must go”, as the workers argued that the President’s men were incompetent.
Even though no specific date was given at the open interaction with the senior and junior staff, after an earlier closed door meeting with management and union leaders, Daily Guide learnt that President Mills told the union leaders that arrangements are in place to ensure that TOR gets crude oil by next month while waiting for a government-to-government deal with Nigeria which had failed to materialize.
The position contradicts yesterday mornings’ pronouncement by the acting Chief Executive of the National Petroleum Authority (NPA), Alex Kofi Mould that crude should be expected in December, raising questions about the sincerity of the President’s assurances. Previous assurances of arrival of crude oil from Nigeria had been still born, including the 90-day credit agreement reached with the leading oil producing country in Africa.
An un-amused President Mills retorted that it was not for the workers to make a demand for the removal of his appointees, a reaction which set the tone for an unfruitful meeting especially with Dr. Kwame Ampofo’s insistence that the first Gentlemen would take only three questions from the workers. He however pointed out that his government is aware of charlatans in the oil business and that these persons would be made to face the full rigours of the law when found out.
The staff expressed misgivings about what they described as the disrespectful manner in which the Energy Minister, Oteng-Adjei, interacted with them when he visited the facility recently, adding such behavior does not help in finding solutions to the challenges at hand. President Mills assuaged the pain of the workers by stating that “we must be sober and temperate in our speech and actions and be mindful that the people who put us in power can dethrone us.
It is for this reason that we must respect and bring them closer to us”. There was no stopping the choruses as they rent the air thus: “Atta, ya ye wild ooo” to wit “atta we are wild”. The President patted himself on the back when he asked the workers how many presidents had ever visited them and even interacted with them.
Even before the visit to the facility, announcement about which was all over town earlier, many had expressed misgivings about the outcome of the engagement. Addressing senior and junior staff of the facility in the canteen, President Mills expressed support for workers’ demand that crude oil be made available to them to work on, as they could not be idling about with nothing to do. Putting out the importance of TOR to the nation, he stated that government was working hard to remedy the situation in which the facility was starved of crude oil to work on.
